Medications are often taken for an intended purpose—as a remedy for a health problem. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. A serious issue exists with prescription drug misuse and abuse. Consequences include emergency room visits for accidental overdoses and admissions to drug treatment programs for drug addictions. Furthermore, the consequences may be lasting, with changes both to structure and function of the brain; a grim reality is that the consequences can be fatal.
Another problem with medications is that people may give their prescription drugs to friends or sell prescription drugs for money, thus supporting other people's self-medication, drug habits, and addictions. Exchange of pills is problematic because many pills look the same and one pill may easily be mistaken for another kind of pill. As a result, a person may suffer a serious reaction from unknowingly taking the wrong pill. Even if the person receives the intended pill, the dosage may be wrong because it lacks a doctor's proper care.
Sometimes the problem is not with taking pills; the problem is not remembering to take pills. A patient may forget the appropriate schedule for taking the medication. A patient may forget the proper dose or forget his or her individualized instructions. Thus, the patient may go without necessary medication and suffer as a result. Problems are not always isolated to adults either. Many children have unsupervised and unfettered access to their medications, leading to the same types of issues that challenge adults. Thus, for both young and old, drug use is a serious problem. With all of the problems, one may easily recognize that it is important to have the proper amount of medication, taken at the right time of day and with care by a proper authority, in order to have a healthy population.